Random Musings
by hvm2k2
Summary: A place for story ideas that are incomplete.


Disclaimer – It should be obvious, but I do not own Harry Potter nor do I own John Ringo's Into the Looking Glass or Star Craft.

Veteran of the Demon Wars

Lieutenant First Class Lilith Meredith Potter sighed as she pulled her ever-full canteen from her belt and took a drink. The demons had completely stripped every bit of flora and fauna to feed their spawning pools. Up until just a few short minutes ago it was so over run that it had required five one-megaton "purified" bombs to clean out. Even then, that didn't clear out any demons that had burrowed underground – her platoon had already been attacked twice since they'd left the Forward Operations Base and they hadn't even reached the city limits of Gettysburg.

The demons had shown up twenty-five years ago – five years before Lilith had been born. They were the result of an American Technomancer named Raymond Chin who had used magic to alter the rules of physics in an enclosed space so he could create something called a Higgs Boson at the University of Florida. The created a big black ball that was shooting out bosons that were linking together to form 'Looking Glass Portals' – large mirror-like circles – that opened up on other worlds.

And certain Looking Glasses were linking up to worlds infested by the demons.

Technically the invaders were extra-terrestrials but since they were magical creatures from another world, everyone called them demons. Either way, that event had plunged the entire world in a war they were still fighting a quarter-century later. To top it off, the Statute of Secrecy had been broken and the muggles were now aware of the magical world.

The worlds governments had of course demanded the magicals fix the problem since one of them created it. Especially when it had been shown that magicals supporting muggle troops made the troops more effective at killing the damned things. Given that even then there were ninety percent casualties among magicals involved in combat (the surviving ten percent were almost all medically retired due to injuries or 'the corruption'), the magicals had pushed through laws in twelve countries that all muggle girls were required to birth magical twins every year between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five.

Of the two children, whichever one had the best DADA scores would be the one drafted into the military. Thus, the magicals could increase their numbers and still provide plenty of soldiers for the demon-war – assuming it lasted that long (which it obviously did). The mothers' families would be well compensated for the children, whom would be taken at birth and sent to live with the father's family. Lilith herself was the result of such a coupling and looked very much like her grandmother and namesake, Lily Potter.

Checking the geiger counter, she nodded as the radiation was low enough that she and her troops wouldn't need a cleansing ritual to keep from getting cancer.

_Not that magicals are really prone to cancer in the first place. Instead we go dark and bat-shit crazy,_ she thought grimly. It was one hell of a discovery that dark magic leaked radiation and it was that radiation that caused magicals to go nuts and start trying to kill everyone in sight. And to top it all off, too much time spent around demons also caused corruption so no magical was allowed to spend more than six months in active combat without being rotated out for cleansing rituals.

The "purified" nukes were actually unstable runic constructs that could be detonated by running some electricity through it. There was still some small residual radiation (as an energy release of that size couldn't help but to produce small amounts) but it took only minutes to fade away instead of the years conventional nukes required. A good portion of China and the Middle East were now uninhabitable for that very reason. Not that that stopped the demons.

Lilith wanted to cast a scanning charm to make sure they weren't about to walk into another ambush, but that was like throwing up a beacon since the damned things homed in on active magic. Instead, she pulled out an enchanted reconnaissance snitch.

Pulling her goggles down over her eyes she mentally commanded the reconnaissance snitch to fly straight up and she was able to get a read on the local area. The specially made snitches had a special enchantment on them based on some guy her dad knew called 'Mad-Eye Moody' and it could see through up to ten feet of solid stone – more than enough to see burrowed demons.

"Damnit," she swore when she saw they were completely surrounded.

"Buckle up! Ones and Twos in front, Threes to the rear!" she yelled at her troops, pulling some shrunken barricades from her belt pouch and canceling the charms. Thankfully it wasn't active magic, so it wouldn't immediately alert the demons that there was a magical present. Her troops were well trained – they ducked behind the magically reinforced walls and immediately brought their rifles up to bear. Of course, they were American Force Recon Marines.

Lilith's troops were all muggles wearing magically created powered armor. The design had actually been taken from an old video game, and basically consisted of an exo-skeleton suit that increased their strength to beyond human limits and protected them from most of the damage they would take in combat. Before the armor became common place, the survival rate of the muggle soldiers was even less than the battle-mages without heavy artillery and air-support.

Their primary weapons were also technomantic, consisting of a bull-pup design where the ammo cartridge was filled with iron fillings. The runic enchantments will draw a single filling into the first chamber – transfiguring it into a an iron spike that was a half-inch thick and three inches long before pushing it into the second chamber. The second chamber had the banishing runes on it which would accelerate the round to just under the speed of sound by the time it left the barrel. Finally the barrel had runes on it that would purge the bullet of impurities and give it a powerful magnetic charge – allowing it to punch through the magically resistant hide of the demons. A selector switch would move the weapon between single-shot, three-round burst, and fully automatic – firing five rounds a second.

These 'Mag-Rifles' were inspired by goblin 'dragon-slayer' weapons – which were lode-stone spears. It was also why goblin weapons could easily kill witches and wizards – the magnetized weapons would go through any shield charms like a killing curse.

The magicals who lived in both worlds were worried about betrayal, so every battle-mage that was entrenched with the muggles was trained to beware anything along the lines of "Order 66." Since Lilith was a natural legilimens, she was one of the ones who it fell to use her non-regulation wizarding wireless broadcaster to announce "Sixty-Six" and let the magical world know they were betrayed.

But given her experiences with her troops, she really didn't see that happening. They loved their technomagic toys way too much.

"Hawkins, get on the horn and get air support! Poncho, focus-fire on the threes with frags," she ordered.

Something must have tipped the demons off because they started to un-tunnel and charge. Lilith herself took cover, and pulled her wand – casting a spell that would conjure napalm and creating several large patches of the burning gel over the demons. That also forced their enemy to go around the patches which set up perfect killing fields. She would have completely surrounded their position with the burning gel, but the terrain didn't allow for it.

Not wanting to attract any more attention, she put her wand away and pulled out her Mag-Rifle – just in case they got too close. Not that she needed to, her troops had it well in hand.

Type Ones were what were called Dog-demons (or hell hounds) and looked like a fur-less pit bull with armor plates. They also had claws that could cut through steel and they could tear into a main battle-tank and kill the crew.

Type Twos were called thorn-throwers had a snake-like body and scythe-like claws, but inside the roof of their mouths they had a pair of grooves that could launch bullet-like thorns that could easily penetrate armor.

Finally, Type Threes were more commonly called Bomblings and were beetle-like things that would literally explode when they got close to you – covering everything around them in a caustic solution that would eat through damned near everything (except other demons – which wasn't fair).

"Troy this is Razor, authentication code Hector-Lima-Seven-One. We south of Gettysburg approximately five miles north of the F.O.B. We are heavily entrenched with Types One through Threes. Requesting immediate Air Support, over!" Hawkins shouted into his radio.

Lilith checked her snitch and saw that even more demons were headed right for them. Luckily they were only Ones and Twos, as Poncho was already busy dealing with the Threes on their flank – his grenade launcher causing the damned things to explode prematurely.

Seeing a One had made it over the wall, Lilith put a three-round-burst into it's skull and went to cover that side of their bunker.

"Barnstorm this is Razor, popping blue smoke to mark our position," Hawkins said as he pulled a flare gun and aimed straight up. The smoke round went up – releasing a trail of colored smoke to mark where her troops were. In the distance the joyful 'Brrrrrrrt' of the A-10 Warthogs could be heard as they swept entire lines of demons away.

"Shit, I see Fours on the North-west horizon!" Dillon yelled.

Type Fours looked like a giant grab with a wasp nest mounted upside down on its back and served as a combination of anti-aircraft and artillery weapons by launching an insane amount of exploding projectiles.

"Billy, Paint them. Hawkins, call it in."

Lance Corporal William Blackhorse – who claimed to be descended from Geronimo – pulled out a laser targeting device while Hawkins radioed HQ. Within seconds, a pair of fighter-jets came flying over head, releasing their guided missiles into the type-fours – though not before the demons had taken out one of the Warthogs.

Her snitch still zooming across the battlefield, Lilith smiled as she saw there were no more demons on approach – they just needed to clean up the thirty or so stragglers still homing in on them.

"Lieutenant, HQ says a full swarm is headed our way. Orders are to set up a beacon for a nuke and cast until you are about to be over run and port-key out."

"Bloody hell, spoke too soon," she muttered. "Alright, I'm linking your port-keys to mine. Billy, power the beacon – we need to draw as many as the bastards in as possible and I'll get us out."

"They really have a hard on for mages," Dillon muttered as he kept shooting at the dog-demons that kept trying to close on them. "Pardon my language, L.T."

"I have several brothers and uncles, Sergeant. I'm more offended you think I'd be offended," Lilith joked as she started casting seige-engine curses and conjuring clouds of white phosphorous and streams of napalm. She'd already cast her strongest bunker-shield over the beacon to protect it

"Oooh... that stirred up the nest. I see six more type-fours! We need to go, ma'am!" Mac warned them – even as the crab-tanks opened up with a barrage of exploding spikes.

"Echo-six-delta-seven!" Lilith called out – triggering her squads port-keys. Her squad vanished in a flash of blue light just as the projectiles hit. A minute later a cruise missile crept over the horizon, centered itself over the swarm of demons and triggered the stressed ward stone – causing everything within five miles to be engulfed in the explosion.

Landing hard on the ground, Lilith took a moment to catch her bearings before sitting up. "Count off," she ordered her troops. Her troops spoke up in order – highest ranked to lowest – and she nodded in satisfaction over not taking any casualties. They weren't normally that lucky.

"Everyone to the armory, medical, then operations for debriefing," she told them – knowing full well they would need to be checked over for corruption before they could turn in their reports.

* * *

AN: Yeah I don't know where I was going with this - it just wouldn't leave my brain and was the only writing I was able to get done in the past two weeks. Since I've been busy between work and re-running all of the plumbing in my house this is all that's getting posted - so my apologies to those waiting for an update to X-Vengers.


End file.
